For Pamela Dawson, the recipient of the 2023 Music Educator Award, making music isn’t just about creating sound waves — it’s about how the movements a person makes can affect the sounds they create. As director of choral music at DeSoto High School in DeSoto, Texas, she uses kinesthesia to help her students find their own voices.
“With choral music, it's all about interpretation,” Dawson says. “What does each word mean? What does each note mean? We use the whole body; we're not just using our mouth, we're not just hearing. We can see the music in front of us, and we're reading it and we hear it, but can you literally feel it?”
Kinesthetic movement is key to Dawson’s teaching methods. She encourages her students to channel their energy and passions into their singing, and to move in ways that help express their voices. These movements also help establish timing and rhythm, and Dawson notes a meditative quality to the movements that is heightened by the hand instruments they use.
“I'm used to the harp being on the entire body with the sound waves going into the body and to the central nervous system,” she says. “There's a healing and a calming process that happens with the harp. Handbells and hand chimes have that same pure tone and actually help calm the spirit.”
For 15 years, Dawson has taught varsity chorus, handbells and piano at the Dallas-area city’s high school, while also overseeing the choral programs at the district’s middle schools to ensure the students are on track to perform at the high school level.
Dawson grew up in Detroit surrounded by a musical family. When her father put her on piano at age 7, she had already been playing harp for two years thanks to instruction from her godsister, the late jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby. In high school, she played clarinet in the school band, and majored in voice with a harp minor in college.
Although music had a large presence in her life, Dawson never planned to teach. She had an administrative job in the private sector she enjoyed when a friend asked her to help with a choral class. The first time she stood in front of the class, she knew she had found her calling. “I walked in the first day and said, ‘Oh my God, what have I been doing all my life? I've been in the wrong career.’ And I fell in love with teaching choral music.”
Dawson has worked extensively with the Texas Music Educators Association and has served as chair of the DeSoto Arts Commission, where she helped organize music festivals and events that have often included her students. In 2022, she was inducted into the DeSoto Independent School District Hall of Honor.
Dawson’s students have gone on to study music at prestigious schools such as Berklee College of Music, and to successful careers in music in Broadway productions. But her true success as a teacher, she says, is helping students discover the music inside of them — and discovering ways to incorporate it into their lives and careers.
“Music is a passion,” she says. “If you have music, you can't run away from it. You can’t hide.”
This article appears in the 2023 GRAMMYs program book, which is available to read here.